41,946 research outputs found
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
Learning Scheduling Algorithms for Data Processing Clusters
Efficiently scheduling data processing jobs on distributed compute clusters
requires complex algorithms. Current systems, however, use simple generalized
heuristics and ignore workload characteristics, since developing and tuning a
scheduling policy for each workload is infeasible. In this paper, we show that
modern machine learning techniques can generate highly-efficient policies
automatically. Decima uses reinforcement learning (RL) and neural networks to
learn workload-specific scheduling algorithms without any human instruction
beyond a high-level objective such as minimizing average job completion time.
Off-the-shelf RL techniques, however, cannot handle the complexity and scale of
the scheduling problem. To build Decima, we had to develop new representations
for jobs' dependency graphs, design scalable RL models, and invent RL training
methods for dealing with continuous stochastic job arrivals. Our prototype
integration with Spark on a 25-node cluster shows that Decima improves the
average job completion time over hand-tuned scheduling heuristics by at least
21%, achieving up to 2x improvement during periods of high cluster load
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Sensor Scheduling in Cyber-Physical Systems
In many Cyber-Physical Systems, we encounter the problem of remote state
estimation of geographically distributed and remote physical processes. This
paper studies the scheduling of sensor transmissions to estimate the states of
multiple remote, dynamic processes. Information from the different sensors have
to be transmitted to a central gateway over a wireless network for monitoring
purposes, where typically fewer wireless channels are available than there are
processes to be monitored. For effective estimation at the gateway, the sensors
need to be scheduled appropriately, i.e., at each time instant one needs to
decide which sensors have network access and which ones do not. To address this
scheduling problem, we formulate an associated Markov decision process (MDP).
This MDP is then solved using a Deep Q-Network, a recent deep reinforcement
learning algorithm that is at once scalable and model-free. We compare our
scheduling algorithm to popular scheduling algorithms such as round-robin and
reduced-waiting-time, among others. Our algorithm is shown to significantly
outperform these algorithms for many example scenarios
The Emergence of Norms via Contextual Agreements in Open Societies
This paper explores the emergence of norms in agents' societies when agents
play multiple -even incompatible- roles in their social contexts
simultaneously, and have limited interaction ranges. Specifically, this article
proposes two reinforcement learning methods for agents to compute agreements on
strategies for using common resources to perform joint tasks. The computation
of norms by considering agents' playing multiple roles in their social contexts
has not been studied before. To make the problem even more realistic for open
societies, we do not assume that agents share knowledge on their common
resources. So, they have to compute semantic agreements towards performing
their joint actions. %The paper reports on an empirical study of whether and
how efficiently societies of agents converge to norms, exploring the proposed
social learning processes w.r.t. different society sizes, and the ways agents
are connected. The results reported are very encouraging, regarding the speed
of the learning process as well as the convergence rate, even in quite complex
settings
Buffer Pool Aware Query Scheduling via Deep Reinforcement Learning
In this extended abstract, we propose a new technique for query scheduling
with the explicit goal of reducing disk reads and thus implicitly increasing
query performance. We introduce \system, a learned scheduler that leverages
overlapping data reads among incoming queries and learns a scheduling strategy
that improves cache hits. \system relies on deep reinforcement learning to
produce workload-specific scheduling strategies that focus on long-term
performance benefits while being adaptive to previously-unseen data access
patterns. We present results from a proof-of-concept prototype, demonstrating
that learned schedulers can offer significant performance improvements over
hand-crafted scheduling heuristics. Ultimately, we make the case that this is a
promising research direction in the intersection of machine learning and
databases
- …